I’ve been trying to get into a community garden here in the neighborhood and am looking forward to maybe next year being my year. The garden at 61st street has been kind of in limbo due to a pending construction project at the University of Chicago. Currently the garden is on University property and they are trying to find a new home for it or try to keep it where it is. I got an email update yesterday saying that they might try to expand the number of people who can have plots by breaking it up into several different locations throughout the neighborhood.

I’m a little bummed that I didn’t get into the garden this year but we did get to plant some tomatoes and chard at my parents’ place in WI. I’m going to check on the tomatoes on Thursday. Hopefully they’re ripe!

When you don’t have you’re own outdoor space you’re at the mercy of others to some extent. Ideally I’d just dig up the front or back yard and plant a garden there but I’m not sure my neighbors would be into it. Our yards are completely wasted space. Maybe next year I can talk them into letting me carve out some gardening space, or maybe they’d be more into having some hens in the yard. Eggs for everyone!

After many months of anticipation farmer’s market season is upon us! Yay!

I have my list of markets to check out and at the top of the list is the 61st Street Farmer’s Market. It’s one of the independently run markets in the city and I’m really hoping it’s good. My goal for the summer is to get as much food as I can from the farmer’s markets hopefully it’s as easy as I think it should be.

Here’s some more info on the market. The 61st Street Farmer’s Market open May 16th and will be happening every Saturday thru October 31st 9am-2pm. They have a lot of special guest speakers, cooking demonstrations and a variety of other events going on throughout the year so check out their website or become a fan on Facebook.

If you live in Chicago and are looking for a market near you, check out the Explore Chicago website.

If you live anywhere else Local Harvest has listings for most of the rest of the country.

Today while taking a little break for lunch and playing around with my iPod Touch, I found a great little app in the App Store from Buster McLeod, called Locavore. It uses data from the Local Harvest website to tell you what fruits and veggies are in season in your area and the dates and times of local farmer’s markets. Really great! You can also choose to look at individual items and see where they are currently in season in the US and find recipes.

I took a look at the Local Harvest website as well and wanted to include their link. The website has a lot of great info on finding a CSA program, farmer’s markets, co-op grocery stores, etc. in your area. It’s a valuable resource for anyone trying to get a little more local and eat seasonally.

Go to Local Harvest’s Website

A couple weeks ago on my drive back from visiting WI I was listening to NPR and heard an interview with the host of Eco Trip, David de Rothschild. It’s a new series on the Sundance Channel about the environmental impact and the steps involved in producing common thing we consume. Very interesting.

Link to Video on Sundance Channel’s Website

The more I’m learning about these things the more motivated (and slightly overwhelmed) I’m becoming. To keep myself from going completely insane I try to remember to not beat myself up too badly over somethings. It’s difficult making the informed decision. Even when you think you have all the info you find out that the info you’re getting isn’t always correct.

I think this series is worth watching. It has a lot of great information.

Hooray!

Well kind of..

Okay so there have been some new guidelines started today here in the US about ‘country of origin’ labeling for meats, fruits and veggies. It’s great, I’m all for it. But I don’t see why it’s a huge change for some things. If you actually read the little tiny stickers on your oranges usually it does tell you if they’re a product of the USA or not. I feel like a lot of the meat packaging I come across tells you where the meat is from as well.

So what’s really changing?

Some labeling guidelines have been established over the years to give consumers more opportunity to know where their food is coming from. There was a push in the 1980’s when people began becoming more conscious again about wanting to know more about the foods they were buying and eating. The new laws on meat packaging will tell us where the animal was raised, slaughtered and processed.

The updated laws on muscle meats:

If the label on the family’s future pork roast reads “Product of USA and Canada,” it most likely means the hog was raised in Canada and then shipped to the U.S. for slaughter and packaging. Or if it reads, “Product of Canada,” then the piglet was born, raised and readied for consumers in Canada before being shipped to the U.S.

More details on the rules for pork, beef, lamb and goat meat:

• Meat may be labeled a U.S. product only if the animal was “born, raised and slaughtered” in the U.S.

• Meat from animals born in another country but raised and slaughtered in the U.S., such as Canadian feeder pigs, can be labeled a U.S. product and/or the other country.

• Meat from animals born, raised and slaughtered outside the U.S. must be labeled as a product of the foreign country from which it came.

• Meat from animals born, raised and/or slaughtered in more than one country – other than the U.S. – may be labeled with a list of those countries.

For Fish & Shellfish – aka (I guess) non-muscle meats.. :

For fish and shellfish, the method of production — wild or farm-raised — must be specified.

The term “farm-raised” means hatched, raised and harvested in captivity, while “wild” means naturally born or hatchery-raised fish and shellfish harvested in the wild.

And of course for every rule there are always exemptions:

Chocolate. Roasted peanuts. Teriyaki-flavored pork loin.

They’re just a few examples of processed foods the USDA has marked as exemptions under the new labeling system, USDA officials say.

What defines a processed food? It’s any commodity that has been altered from its original state. For example, breading or tomato sauce are processed foods.

Also, there are certain methods that create processed foods. They are:
• Cooking (includes frying, broiling, grilling, boiling, steaming, baking and roasting)
• Salt and sugar curing and drying
• Hot and cold smoking
• Emulsifying and extruding

Other examples of processed food items:
• Breaded chicken tenders
• Marinated chicken breasts
• Salad mix that contains lettuce and carrots
• Fruit cups that contain melons,
pineapples and strawberries

Also exempt from new labeling regulations are food service establishments such as restaurants, lunchrooms, cafeterias, food stands, bars, lounges and similar enterprises.

This is the biggie!

So really, salad greens that have carrots mixed in are considered a processed food? So you aren’t going to tell me where my bag of salad came from, that kind of sucks.

All the more reason to, if you actually care about this stuff, to go to the farmer’s market or grow your own salad greens or at the very least buy a pre-packaged bag of salad that’s certified organic.

I’m not saying that non-organic iceberg lettuce is the devil but the more I’m paying attention to what I’m buying and reading more and more about how our food is grown and what the impact is I’m starting to lean more to the organic small scale farm side. If you can’t make a perfect choice at least try to make the best choice you can. Organic food is expensive!! Organic meat is really expensive! But that being said I have fought my inner penny pincher and sucked up the extra couple bucks for a pound of chicken. I’ve sat in the poultry aisle with the 2 packages, one in each hand, and have battled it out. Organic doesn’t always win. Sometimes I just can’t spend $11 for 3 chicken breasts but I try to do it most of the time.

Baby steps.

I’m really looking forward to the next couple months. I’m lucky to now live within a few blocks of a farmer’s market. Last summer I had the best intentions to go every week but it just wasn’t convenient and I wasn’t willing to make the time to go. I made it once. This year I’m hoping to do much better.

My first battle is food and then I’ll move in to the home goods. Food is a little easier for me. Though it is bothering me that the bed we just bought was made in China and every night as I rest my little head on my pillow I think to myself, “Is this thing going to get recalled because it’s leeching toxic chemicals into my body?”. It probably won’t get recalled but I still think it might be leeching toxic chemicals into my body..

Anyway, that’s going to be my next challenge. My New Year’s resolution is going to be to try to only buy things made in the US. I’ve been kind of doing this but sometimes it’s really really hard.

Back to Slow Food.. A while ago I learned about this organization called Slow Food. It was started in Italy in the late 80’s to protect food heritage. As fast food and convenience food becomes more and more popular people stop learning and passing on those family recipes and culinary traditions. Slow Food is committed to keep those traditions alive and to educate people about the importance of knowing where your food comes from.

There are branches of Slow Food all over the world, including a Chicago chapter. We’ve joined and I’m looking forward to going to some events. I’m going to start saving my pennies for next year’s cheese..

Way too long. Well the past month has been exciting. I went to Oregon. It was fantastic. Drank a lot of wine, sat by the ocean, ate amazing seafood and most importantly relaxed.

Came back home and have been working my ass off. It’s good though, I like being busy. I just kind of wish I had a little tiny bit more time to enjoy the weather, but all in all I can’t complain.

Another big thing I’ve been diving into over the past month is altering my diet a bit. It all kind of started with the whole grocery experiment in April. Slowly since then I’ve been really reading labels, trying to buy more local produce, working on supporting local businesses instead of just going online and buying from bigger superstore types of places.

Last year I did my big olive curing project. I bought those olives from a farm in California. They had kind of a bummer year this year and have posted on their website that they only have about 15% of what they had last year. They lost a lot of fruit to a late freeze. Boo! I’ve been looking forward to this since last year. So I started looking around and found an Italian grocery here in Chicago that carries uncured olives. They have a couple different varieties which is great and we don’t have to buy 10 pounds. We’re going to go out there this weekend and get a couple pounds. We’re going to try out oil curing. Not my favorite but the hubby likes them. I’m excited about that. It’ll be a little easier to experiment with some different flavors and methods on a smaller scale.

The other thing I’m kind of jazzed up about today is finding out that the Wood Street Urban Farm has a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. Why am I just learning about this now?

If you’re not familiar with CSA’s it’s a program where you pay a fee for a season or a set time period and you receive fresh produce from the farm. The money you pay helps the farm cover expenses. The double bonus for the Growing Home’s CSA program is that they aren’t just a farm, they provide job training and assistance to homeless and low-income men and women in Chicago. So you help the farm, you help some people and you get to eat food grown on a farm in Chicago. I’d heard about the Urban Farm before but I didn’t know much about it.

The grocery experiment went well. Overall the total for the week was a couple dollars under our normal budget. I think it was $2. Not bad though. I thought for sure it would be more expensive to shop like this. I did go to Jewel once, but got out of there for under $30 which is unbelievable. The thing that gets me at the bigger stores is all the stuff on ’sale’. I go with a list and a good idea of what we need for the week but get sidetracked and end up buying a couple extra this and one more of that because it’s a good deal. I try really really hard not to be a sucker for these marketing strategies but inevitably get roped in. The other major problem with shopping at the supermarkets is buying more than we can actually eat in a reasonable amount of time, especially produce. So at the end of the week before we’d get ready to do the next big shopping I’d end up throwing things out that have gone bad.

The grocery experiment will continue and I’m going to find some other ways to reduce some waste and be a bit more frugal.

One thing I did do last week is buy some nylon reusable shopping bags. I have some big tote bags that I always forget to bring with me. These are handy and I have them in my purse so I have no excuse. Normally by then end of the week our plastic bag drawer is hitting capacity but we only acquired 4 bags this week.

I also managed to actually get out and be somewhat social this past week too. Thursday I went to Huttenbar in Lincoln Square. Cool place, horrible music! Some people who really loved Carrie Underwood commandeered the juke box and tortured us. Once they left it didn’t get much better but after a few pints Elton John and the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack aren’t so bad.

Friday went to lunch at Lula. It wasn’t the best this time but I don’t think I was actually in the mood for that food. I really wanted something greasy, Lula is not the place to go when you have a craving for unhealthy things.

Saturday I ran around most of the day shopping, buying dog food general errands. Drove past a condo that looked interesting but it didn’t have any outdoor space so the hunt kind of continues.

Sunday Adam had a show. It was great! We stayed out way too late ate a pizza at 2 in the morning and had a lazy Monday.

And now it’s Tuesday. I’m starting a new project this week which I need to get working on..